


Sherlollipops - Waiting For A Girl Like You

by MizJoely



Series: 221 Sherlollipops [117]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Sherlolly - Freeform, Songfic, references to drug abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-05
Updated: 2016-01-05
Packaged: 2018-05-11 21:22:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5642422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MizJoely/pseuds/MizJoely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's waiting for her. Will she come this time?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sherlollipops - Waiting For A Girl Like You

**Author's Note:**

> Anonymous on tumblr asked: That picture you reblogged with Benedict waiting at the wall - do you think you could write a short fic with him waiting intently for Molly and she's late? EEK
> 
> Me: Not quiiittteee what you asked for but the prompt and my recent viewing of the special put this songfic (Foreigner’s _Waiting For A Girl Like You_ ) in my head.

_I’ve been waiting for a girl like you, to come into my life…_

He tried to be casual. Resting one arm against the wall at should-height, the other awkwardly by his side. Ridiculous. He turned and started picking nervously at the moss growing in the cracks, then forced himself to stop. Next his fingers were nervously drumming against his blue-jean-clad thighs (would she like the less formal clothing he’d elected wear to demonstrate his resolve not to fall back into bad habits?) before exclaiming in annoyance at himself.

_I’ve been waiting for a girl like you, a love that will survive…_

There was no reason for him to be nervous. She said she’d come, and Molly Hooper was a woman of her word. He rubbed at one cheek, not exactly unconsciously since he was always conscious of her actions, but certainly reflexively. She’d slapped him three times when she found out he’d been using during the Magnussen case; how much more disappointed in him would she be now, even though he’d finally acknowledged how damaging his drug use (addiction, don’t lie to yourself, Sherlock) was and gone to rehab? For the third and – he hoped – final time.

_I’ve been waiting for someone new, to make me feel alive…_

She’d been so angry with him, but underneath the anger had been the hurt, the disappointment, and that had been even harder to face. But when the Moriarty imposters (yes, just as he’d deduced, it was a group of people who’d decided to use the idea of Moriarty as a smokescreen for their individual crimes) had been dealt with and the boredom of life without a spectacular case loomed before him, he’d actually found himself taking his brother and John’s words to heart. _You can’t keep doing this, Sherlock, lists or no lists. You need to find some way to deal with boredom that doesn’t involve injecting or ingesting or snorting poisons into your system._ He didn’t know who’d been more shocked, Mycroft or John, when he’d agreed with them. But it wasn’t their eyes that he saw in that moment, but hers. Brown and hurt and brimming with well-deserved anger at him for once again endangering himself. For lying to himself and everyone else.

_Yeah waiting, for a girl like you, to come into my life…_

Aside from helping him understand the fundamentals behind Moriarty’s so-called return from the dead, his psychedelic journey into the depths of his own mind had made one other thing crystal clear: he wanted very much to be a man that Molly Hooper could once again admire, even if he’d destroyed her ability to love him.

He’d been waiting for her all along, and never realized it until it was too late.

He sighed and tilted his head back, wishing desperately for a cigarette. But nicotine and alcohol were both forbidden to him now, since they were nothing more than crutches that helped foster a worse dependency.

He shoved his hands into his pocket. She would come, she would pick him up and drive him back to London, but she wouldn’t love him anymore. And it was all his own damn fault for not recognizing how much he valued her as a person in her own right…how much he cared for her…until she’d already gotten over him.

“What makes you think that?”

Sherlock came back to himself with a start; he hadn’t even realized how deeply he’d withdrawn into his own mind…nor that he’d been speaking aloud. “I know what this looks like,” he blurted out as he stared into the very brown eyes he’d just been despairing over. “But it’s not that, I promise.”

Her lips quirked up in a soft smile. “It’s not you getting lost in your own mind, which you’re perfectly capable of doing even without chemical assistance? Because I promise, that’s all I thought it was, Sherlock.”

“How can you still trust me?” he wondered, reaching out and gingerly taking her hand in his. “How can you believe me?”

“Because this time you wanted to get clean,” she said. “You didn’t do this because Mycroft bullied you into it, or John or Mary. You didn’t do it out of guilt – well, not entirely out of guilt,” she corrected herself. “The point is, you didn’t do it for anyone else but yourself. And that’s the only way you’ll get clean and stay clean. Because it’s what you want for you.”

“And what if I want…something else?”

Her eyes widened and her hold on his hand tightened. “Sherlock, you can’t try to get clean for someone else,” she warned him. “Not John, not Mary, and definitely not me. You know that no one person can be responsible for someone else’s sobriety, you _know_ that, Sherlock…”

“No, I did it for me,” he reassured her. Promised her. “I did it for me because Mycroft was right.” He wrinkled his nose at the confession. “And John, and Mary, and my parents…everyone was right and I was wrong. Arrogant, and wrong. If I kept on as I was, I would lose them all. All of them. And you,” he added softly. “I would lose you. And even if I can only ever have you as a friend and not…not something more, that’ll be more than enough.”

“Silly man,” Molly whispered as she tiptoed up and brushed her lips against his. “You had me at ‘I did it for me’.”

He closed his eyes and held her tightly to him, unbearably happy to discover that he hadn’t lost his chance after all.

_Now, I know it’s right_

_From the moment I wake up till deep in the night_

_There’s nowhere on earth that I’d rather be_

_Than holding you, tenderly_


End file.
